A Forest
by JumpingShips
Summary: What can a pair of two human beings do for each other as they struggle to understand themselves and each other on a far-off world of sublimity and war?


**A Forest**

* * *

Tempered muscles ached and tired feet dragged through the alien forest. Two evening suns peaked at Taz and Up through the turquoise canopy as they hung low in the sky.

"We're almost there," Taz comforted. Her nostrils flared as she breathed inward.

"The wind...you can smell the ocean."

Up muttered something about water that Taz couldn't decipher. She had his arm slung over him and kept her other arm wrapped against his upper torso, careful not to graze the plasma burns that shone horribly on his gut. The bio-foam used to keep the wound from worsening had faded an hour ago.

"I'm thirsty, " Up simply said.

Taz held back a choking reflex at the sound of his dry voice. She looked around for a decent place to sit and take a brief respite. Night was fast approaching. Looking around at the foliage she saw glowing fungi, getting slowly more and more bright as night drew more close. The fungi peppered the forest floor and some grew on trees, lighting the way in that strange forest with pale-green and blue light that was ever so soft.

She found a suitable patch of dirt with a mossy triplet of boulders suitable to lean back on.

"Oh, this looks nice. Let's chill here," he said, groaning out the last part of his sentence as Taz ever so slowly lowered him down. She reached around her side and clipped the canteen off her belt and handed it to Up, watching his eyes in the fluorescent light. He took two rapid gulps and one big one before handing it back to her. She took one deep sip whilst watching Up.

"How is it?" She asked.

Up winced a little as he eased himself a tad more comfortable.

"I've had worse."

"Yeah. Here."

Taz took reached forward and gently poured some of the water onto his torso where the burn was. Up didn't hiss in pain but Taz knew better. Plasma burns were known to be excruciating in comparison to other kinds of burn injuries. And Up took the full brunt of the blast from a rifle.

"Stop that. Save the water, I still have some."

She complied, nodded solemnly. Her face was close to his and they stared at each other for a moment. Up's ragged panting is all that was heard.

"I got you," Taz said as she sat down next to Up very carefully, minding his posture in the dark.

"You got me," he said while taking special attention to her bare shoulder rubbing next to his.

"Shit, I bet Krayonder and Tootsie are just loaded with bio-foam at the infirmary," Up joked.

Taz wanted to whirl her head in confusion but even she knew better to make sudden movements when death was looming in the same forest you were in.

Her face, if it could have been seen, was aghast.

"Nah nah, I meant like...you know, waiting for us," Up dispelled.

Taz sighed.

"Jesus."

"My bad."

They said nothing for a beat.

"Wish we had a way to contact," Taz said.

"Too bad that military-issue, hi-tech fancy dinger doodle got fried in some shit."

Another beat nothing was said.

"Up," Taz said with a feeling of hidden urgency.

Up rubbed the sweat from his forehead, adjusting his bandanna.

"They're close, I know."

Taz briefly scanned their surroundings, taking in the location of each patch of fungi and tree.

"How close you think they could see us?"

Up leaned forward, bracing himself to resume their painful journey. More like, fleeing from the chase.

"Dunno. They're a little less than a mile from us by now if they were moving as fast as we saw three hours ago."

Taz kept a stern look towards the direction behind them.

"If they're as tired as we are...maybe not so bad."

"No. These would be new ones."

She felt her muscles in her face tighten on instinct.

"Yeah, the others are wasted. They'll be moving faster than us...and..." she trailed off.

"I know, I'm slowin' us down."

Taz felt a sting in her chest, "Don't talk like that."

"Shut up. It's the truth. Good news is that all this fungi will help us. They give off these sub-atomic rays or some shit that reacts with night-vision. Can't say for thermal though."

"But I'm willing to bet these are greens on us, not used to this kinda place. You saw 'em."

Up decided to take one more swig of water.

A warm breeze swept the top of the trees, traveling downward and brushing across their faces. The humidity was something unearthly and the both of them were a sweaty mess. Just thinking of it made Taz take another gulp from her canteen along with Up.

She went to wipe off her face when the thick wetness of her glove reminded her what happened today. The metallic smell of blood on her hand brought a nauseating replay of this morning. Out of the cacophony of images, the memory came and went in waves mixed with agony and helplessness with a burning sensation crashing inside her thoughts.

* * *

_Earlier that morning_

A low buzzing arose from the forest floor, intermingled with the hooting of birds both plump and thin. The scenery was of the most lush serenity yet the hidden aura of horror this place exhibited was palpable.

Shallow graves were buried around this area as more and more battles arose here. Skirmishes here and there with dazzling flashes of light and dream-like bulbs of heat appearing and disappearing betwixt the trees at frantic oppositions. More and more the casualties rose. Keeping up with the roster on who was alive and who was dead or missing was a grim ordeal and also wildly inaccurate.

Recent floods pushed the corpses further into the wet earth by toxic waters, sometimes accompanied by stray sea-living creatures up-heaved by unforgiving natural currents that the nearby ocean possessed, only to suffocate on the forest floor.

The sea was prone to floods during heavy rains and would gush it's poisonous water into the adjacent woods and fill the basin.

A quality one should pay attention to was the way the basin plantation would quite literally 'drink' the water. Absorbing it at an eerie rate wholly unnatural. And the poisoned water itself could be touched but to drink it was fatal – this water is what also nourished the luminescent fungi that glittered in the labyrinthine forest with it's monthly floods.

Healthy condensation dripped from the leaves of mother demtha trees, it's enzymes rendering the spores of the ocean waters useless.

Up held a drinking gourd underneath a giant leaf gathering this dew. Bipedal creatures that lived a hundred millenia before the first drop of primordial ooze at the breeding ground of Earth's proto-plasmic pool of single-cell chaos would gather and worship this dew.

And here Up was near drunk with hidden giddiness as he reveled in the simplicity of water falling into a drinking gourd.

"Oh baby, give it to me now."

When he saw the very top was just about to overflow he quickly took the gourd away from the tip of the leaf and took an eager swig before returning to for a refill.

Taz had her eyes closed, sitting in a meditative posture. She shook her head.

"You really shouldn't drink all that much. When the firing starts you'll be pissin' in a bush."

"This water taste like lemons! Holy shit!"

Up was finally satisfied. He slowly lowered himself from the thick branch he was propped on and slid down the giant trunk a few feet until he landed with a soft 'plop' on the mossy ground. Motes of light floated in and out of holes in the trees, blue and yellow they were, given off the insects.

Up took on a more serious tone as he strapped his vest a little tighter. His eyes traced the area in sight. If a fight were to take place here it would be in their favor; the branches were wide and thick and twisting around them. The foliage offered both camouflage and fortitude.

"Hey Taz, you ever think of retiring to a place like this?"

She opened her eyes at that one.

"Or you ever think of retiring at all?" Up asked.

She turned her head.

"Why would I retire?"

Up still looked beyond the canvas of trees, half laughing as he spoke.

"Well, why not?"

Taz didn't say anything. She looked at his face as he stared into the distance. He hadn't shaved his face in a week, what with them two constantly moving. Their provisions ran low and it was only after intuition they dared to drink the water that dripped from the trees.

They were only scouting the outer rim of the territory for any signs of activity. Which was asinine given how random the forest appears to be. Unless you found a spaceship stuck in a tree, you couldn't tell if a group of twenty came trotting through. The isolation was both annoying and invigorating to Up, however.

"Forget it. I was just thinking," Up said. "I guess I need a break."

"Hey it's cool, man. I get it. We all wanna go home at some point, that's all," Taz said as she scooted a foot closer.

"This place, though. Look at it. This shit was here before humans or something and it hadn't changed in like, a billion years. This water I'm drinking is the same water that was here before then."

Taz was confused.

"How can something like an entire forest live the same way it's always been? The trees get taller, sure. But what else? Can't I be a tree?"

Now Taz was really confused.

"Sir, I don't think you could be a tree. Really."

Up scratched his head as he looked Taz in the eye, "No, I guess not."

They shared a chuckle between them. Up eyed the way Taz's teeth showed for a quick moment before disappearing beneath her lips. Those lips that constantly kept her smile at bay.

"You know, if there's anyone else out here they're probably as bored as we are," she said.

Up leaned up all the way against the trunk, looking directly upward.

"Wanna get a better view of the place?"

Taz looked up with him as if to see the idea from his point of view.

"Not really."

"Me either."

Up shrugged, Taz chuckled.

They sat in silence for what was an eternity. Taz looked a ways down from they sat, taking in the features of the ground that was barely visible amongst all the vegetation. This was a snug spot to be in; not on the forest floor, hidden at all angles while maintaining vision in a widespread fan. She looked over at Up, quietly regarding him when he noticed. Nodded at nothing in particular.

And they had security. Their troubles briefly forgotten in this little pocket of the whole universe.

* * *

A/N: This is pretty much set to almost the same tone as my other Starship fic ' A Statue of Her, ' which I straight-up abandoned (like every other piece of fiction) mainly because I made the scope of things far too epic and unfocused, thus losing the drive to continue mainly out of frustration and embarrassment. The second chapter is just all over the place and full of so many ideas I can't even express myself while keeping it interesting. But anyway, this little number will be short and sweet with only a few chapters of similar length.

Also I will most likely come back and add more to this first chapter, yep yep. How about some suggestions on how you would like to see the story carry? Or maybe a way I could deliver certain prose to make things actually interesting to you? :)


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